Routine Essentials: Essential Routines
By Victoria Fortune
Labor Day is fast approaching, and as many mourn the end of summer, relishing one last weekend of cocktails and cookouts and outdoor excursions, I secretly long for fall. I was always the kid who, by summer’s end, couldn’t wait for school to begin. No matter how much I’d looked forward to summer, no matter how much I had reveled in amorphous days spent doing whatever, come fall, I was eager for routine, despite knowing that by the next spring I would be sick of it once again. I’m no longer in school, but little has changed.
As a writer, the ability to set a routine and stick to it is critical. As a mother, my routine is necessarily structured around the school day. When summer comes, it is usually cast aside along with the school backpacks. This summer, I was determined to keep making progress. I needed deadlines to keep writing at the top of my priority list, so in May I signed up for a Grub Street class that required generating ten pages a week. It kept my feet to the fire. When that class ended in late June, I signed up for Camp Nanowrimo with a goal of writing 14,000 words in July. Again, the external deadline helped me keep up the momentum.
Then August rolled around. Camp ended, the desire to make the most of the remaining summer days took over. I did a lot of reading, a whole lot of mom-duty, had my fill of socializing and day-dreaming and back-to-school preparations. Now I’m eager, desperate even, to get back to work. Those images from the old Staples commercial come to mind, where the parents are dancing through the aisles singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” as they buy school supplies.
As with my exercise routine (which also fell by the wayside in August), the hardest part is re-establishing habits. For inspiration, I searched online and found countless blog posts offering advice, such as “11 Tips for Creating a Writing Routine” and “The Write Time: 6 Strategies to Make Your Writing Schedule Sacred”. But my favorite is “The Daily Routines of 12 Famous Writers,” by James Clear. The routines described are as diverse as the authors, but there are some patterns.
Many authors write first thing in the morning: Barbara Kingsolver and Haruki Murakami both begin at 4 a.m., Kurt Vonnegut at 5:30, Maya Angelou at 6:30. Ernest Hemingway would write “every morning as soon after first light as possible.” Another article by Sarah Stodola, who studied the sleep and work habits of famous authors, claims that fewer authors are night owls, and those who are seem to have a harder time sticking to a regular schedule. My ideal would be Edith Wharton’s routine: wake early, write in bed till noon, then get up and go about the rest of the day. Alas, I do not have a servant to bring me breakfast. Instead, like Barbara Kingsolver, “the school bus is my muse.” My writing time begins and ends with my daughter’s school day, which motivates me to use it wisely.
Having a routine helps me “[w]ork according to Program and not according to mood,” as Henry Miller advised. “When you can’t create, you can work.” This was another common refrain among the authors. “You must write whether you feel like it or not,” as Khaled Housseni put it. You have to treat it like a job and put in your hours. E.B. White famously noted, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” I’ve had plenty of days when the writing felt so laborious and the results so poor, I’ve wondered whether I ought to be devoting my time to another endeavor. It is reassuring to hear that even the most successful authors struggle and produce crappy first drafts. Kingsolver says she has to write a hundred pages before she gets to page one; and Jodi Picoult cautions, “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” According to Karen Russell,
the trick is just to keep after it for several hours, regardless of your own vacillating assessment of how the writing is going. Showing up and staying present is a good writing day. . . . The periods where writing feels effortless and intuitive are, for me, as I keep lamenting, rare. But . . . if you can make peace with the fact that you will likely have to throw out 90 percent of your first draft, then you can relax and even almost enjoy “writing badly.”
Another thread through most of the writers’ comments is that they do take time out for other activities. Several said rigorous exercise was an essential part of their writing routine, pointing out that staying physically fit and disciplined went hand in hand with staying mentally fit and focused. Others claimed that time with family and friends was an important part of their day. However, “Write first and always,” Henry Miller insisted. “Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”
While my daughters groan about the looming first day of school, I eye my desk, itching to get back to my writing routine. As I do, I will be trying out Hemingway’s trick for maintaining momentum: “You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”
Photo credit: dreamstime_l_98032314_BacktoRoutine
